A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [131]
Food exemplifies the difficulty of withdrawing from the modern economy, because you can't live without it and because not many people produce all of their own. And if it's uncommon for a modern person to be food self-reliant, it is almost unheard of for a community to supply all of its own food. That is only recently the case; merely one hundred and fifty years ago here in Spokane, the natives lived self-reliantly and sustainably. One of their staples, for example, was salmon. During the massive runs, people placed boxes under falls over which salmon leapt on their way to spawn and die. Some of the salmon fell into the boxes; these the people who lived here ate, or dried, to eat later. Salmon and human communities coexisted, and could presumably have done so indefinitely. Now, even had the salmon not been killed by the dams that destroyed the Columbia as a free river, there are too many people here in Spokane—300,000 in the county—for the salmon to have supported all of us over the long-term. Nor can the community take other food from the river; signs near the Spokane River warn that its fish—native and introduced trout— are contaminated with PCBs.
I recently had dinner with George. We did not eat fish. Instead we ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. I had lemon-grass chicken with chili, and George had stir-fried vegetables. Both meals were excellent, and both consisted of foods originating far from Spokane. Although we didn't ask the cook where the chicken and other foodstuffs came from, it isn't difficult to construct an entirely plausible scenario. Here it is: the chicken was raised on a factory farm in Arkansas. The factory is owned by Tyson Foods, which supplies one-quarter of this nation's chickens and sends them as far away as Japan. The chicken was fed corn from Nebraska and grain from Kansas. One of seventeen million chickens processed by Tyson that week, this bird was frozen and put onto a truck made by paccar. The truck was made from plastics manufactured in Texas, steel milled in Japan from ore mined in Australia and chromium from South Africa, and aluminum processed in the United States from bauxite mined in Jamaica. The parts were assembled in Mexico. As this truck, with its cargo of frozen chickens, made its way toward Spokane, it burned fuel refined in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Washington from oil originating beneath Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. All this, and I have chickens outside my door.
The making of the vegetarian dish was no less complex. The broccoli in George's stir-fried vegetables was grown in Mexico. The field was fertilized with, among other things, ammonium nitrate from the United States, phosphorous mined and processed by Freeport McMoRan from deposits in Florida, and potassium from potash deposits in Sasketchewan. This potash was processed by any one of the multinational mining, oil, and chemical companies: Texasgulf, Swift, PPG Industries, RTZ, or Noranda. The pesticides we ingested are equally cosmopolitan.
Another company associated with nearly every facet of our meal was AKZO, which has 350 facilities in 50 countries. The meal utilized many of their 10,000 chemical products: chicken vaccines that enable Tyson to keep their operations relatively disease-free; automobile coatings; chemicals used in many steps of the agricultural and manufacturing processes, and so on.
This was truly an international meal, and not merely because we ate at a Vietnamese restaurant. The simple pleasure of eating a fine meal is tied to processes involving literally thousands of people working for many companies in numerous countries, manifesting the intricate and interconnected nature of the global economy, which runs like a well-oiled machine.
The processes behind the meal manifest not only the complexity